Patrick OShaughnessy
@patrick_oshag • 339,258 subscribers
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My conversation with Daniel S. Loeb, his first ever podcast and one I've been wanting to do for years. Dan started Third Point in 1995 with $3 million. Today the firm manages over $24 billion across equities, credit, venture, and insurance. Along the way he wrote some of the most iconic activist letters. We discuss: - Why deep value stopped working - The power of writing - The Twitter and XAI credit trades - Lessons from FTX and Danaher - The Sony and Sotheby's stories - What makes a great analyst today - The importance of kindness I feel lucky we all get to learn from one of the greats. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 2:48 Macro Views and Tech Trends 5:13 The Roots of Third Point 10:30 Evolving to Quality and Thematic Investing 19:07 Market Psychology and Inefficiencies 24:10 Good and Bad Corporate Governance 29:19 Activism 31:23 Sotheby's 41:37 AI 44:28 Sony 52:50 Danaher's Operating System 56:31 Building an Insurance Business 59:25 FTX 1:05:17 What Makes a Great Analyst Today 1:07:24 The Next Decade 1:10:00 Kindest Thing
Patrick OShaughnessy1,331,039 views • 6 days ago
Krishna Rao is the CFO of Anthropic, and this is his first podcast appearance. He joined the company two years ago when run-rate revenue was about $250M. Today it is $30B. He has helped raise ~$75B and is responsible for the procurement and allocation of compute. I feel lucky we get to hear what it is like to sit inside a company this consequential at a moment this pivotal. We discuss: - The cone of uncertainty - How he allocates compute across Trainium, TPUs, and GPUs - What investors misunderstand about model companies - Why the returns to frontier intelligence keep rising - Platform vs application and where Anthropic builds its own products - How Anthropic uses Claude internally I have asked my closing question about the kindest thing more than 500 times. Krishna's answer is one I have never heard before. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 2:38 The Compute Canvas 6:51 The "Cone of Uncertainty" 11:58 Why the Returns to Frontier Intelligence Are So High 16:45 Recursive Self-Improvement 20:20 Scaling Laws 23:30 Sourcing $100 Billion in Compute 28:05 Platform vs. Application Strategy 32:52 Pricing Dynamics 38:48 How Anthropic’s Finance Team Uses Claude 43:24 Raising Capital & Overcoming Investor Skepticism 52:32 Public Perception, Risks, and Government Regulation 57:25 Mythos Release 1:12:33 What Could Derail the AI Revolution? 1:13:47 Biotech and Healthcare 1:15:31 The Kindest Thing
Patrick OShaughnessy3,203,964 views • 21 days ago
My guest today is Paul Tudor Jones (Paul Tudor Jones), one of the greatest macro traders of all time. He correctly predicted the 1987 stock market crash and shorted the Japanese bubble in 1990. For over 40 years, his flagship fund has had a negative correlation to the S&P 500. 100% of his returns are alpha. He says today's market has so many similarities to 2000, "the easiest bear market I've ever seen in my whole life." He makes the case for going long dollar-yen, why Bitcoin beats gold as an inflation hedge, and why he was wrong about Warren Buffett. But what I'll remember most from this conversation is Paul's zest for life. He's 71 and still wakes at 2:30 every morning to trade the London open. He works out for two hours a day. He walks with his wife every evening. He travels the country chasing peak spring and peak fall. He's so excited about the songs picked for his funeral that he wishes he could be there to hear them. Paul has lived five lifetimes in one. He's one of the most entertaining and interesting people I've met, and the conversation will leave you searching to be as passionate about what you do as he is about what he does. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:00 The Kindest Thing 13:19 Trading vs. Investing 17:33 Lessons from Warren Buffet 22:24 The Existential Risks of AI 29:54 The Nature of Trading 31:46 Bitcoin 35:55 Bubbles 42:08 A Day in the Life of PTJ 46:00 Information Overload 47:07 Passion for Markets 50:49 The Robin Hood Foundation 54:18 The Workless World 56:03 Journalism 1:00:00 Principal Components of a Great Life 1:05:06 Kill Them With Kindness
Patrick OShaughnessy5,430,526 views • 1 month ago
This is my sixth conversation with Gavin Baker. As always with Gavin, the conversation covers a lot of ground, but we spend the most time on watts and wafers. We discuss: - Why the wafer shortage may prevent an AI bubble - Data centers in space (reframed) - Elon's Terafab and the new chip companies challenging Nvidia - Usage-based pricing - The disaggregation of GPUs - DRAM, frontier tokens, and open source Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 7:55 Anthropic and OpenAI Valuations 12:58 Watts, Wafers, and Infrastructure 14:39 Orbital Compute and Data Centers in Space 22:49 Avoiding the AI Bubble 28:26 Terafab and the Future of US Manufacturing 32:16 Returns to the Frontier 37:23 Continual Learning 42:03 New Chip Companies 48:52 Extending GPU Lifespans and Private Credit 51:22 The Application Layer 57:32 The Token Path and Open-Source Dynamics 1:01:37 Cybersecurity 1:05:46 Diversity Breakdown 1:11:59 Assessing the Big Tech Players in AI 1:19:02 Geopolitics, Personal Safety, and the AI Horizon
Patrick OShaughnessy1,625,441 views • 14 days ago
My guest today is Brian Chesky (Brian Chesky), founder and CEO of Airbnb and one of the great consumer founders of the last 20 years. Paul Graham coined "founder mode" based on Brian's experience running Airbnb. This conversation is about what comes after it, what he calls AI founder mode, and how it will force founders to focus even more on the details. We talk about his eleven-star exercise for finding product market fit, why your first hire should be a recruiter, and why Airbnb's $100B IPO became one of the saddest days of his life. Brian still comes across like the 17 year-old at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) who picked to study industrial design. His heroes are all artists. Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Walt Disney, and Steve Jobs, all of whom were working the week they died because they loved what they did. Rick Rubin taught him that an artist is only an artist when they make things for themselves. Now Brian believes AI is the opportunity for all of us to do the same. Enjoy! Timestamps: 1:00 Studying Industrial Design 11:33 AI Founder Mode 17:02 Lack of Consumer AI Companies 22:10 Small Teams and Focused Problems 30:52 The Evolution from Founder to CEO 38:13 The 11-Star Experience 41:07 AI as a Canvas for Creativity 48:17 Detaching from Success 53:12 Founder-Led Moats 58:34 The Next Chapter of Airbnb 1:03:08 What Endures in the Age of AI 1:06:43 Lessons from Bodybuilding 1:10:20 The CEO's No. 1 Job 1:17:01 Activating Talent 1:20:39 The Kindest Thing
Patrick OShaughnessy2,568,556 views • 29 days ago
Ari's bet on live sports and events has been so right In a world of a 4-day work week and infinite content, the demand for live is only going up Knicks Finals tickets are at all-time highs US Open tennis tickets broke last year's records And the limit of what people will pay for premium experiences has essentially no ceiling
Patrick OShaughnessy127,004 views • 2 days ago
My second conversation with Darren Farber, Managing Partner of Albion River (a defense-focused investment firm) and former special advisor at the DoD. With US-Iran negotiations still unfolding, we spent most of our time on what winning actually means in a theater like Iran. We discuss: - The Strait of Hormuz - China, Israel and Ukraine - The Eisenhower and Taylor schools of military force - The 20-year plan to co-opt American universities - Magazine depth - The rise of neo-primes Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:00 Theaters of War 3:26 Flexible Power vs. Massive Retaliation 5:14 The Dual Nature of Dictatorships 7:43 Positive Propaganda 10:15 The Strait of Hormuz 11:29 Eisenhower and Taylor's Theories of Escalation 16:48 Grading the U.S. Military's Capabilities 18:01 Assessing China's Illegitimacy 19:41 Magazine Depth 23:20 The Inevitable Fall of Totalitarian Regimes 27:07 Peacetime Mobilization 29:06 Takeaways from Ukraine 30:47 The True Risk of a Taiwan Invasion 32:38 The Rise of Neo-Primes 38:20 The Challenge of Political Will 44:23 Process vs. Outcome in U.S. Politics 46:43 The Dangers of AI in Military Systems
Patrick OShaughnessy523,867 views • 8 days ago
Paul Tudor Jones says the US is more dependent on equity prices than ever, and explains what a 35% correction would trigger in the economy: "We're 252% of stock market cap to GDP. In 1929 we were 65%. In 1987 we got to ~85-90%. In 2000, 170%. If you think about the periodicity of significant bear markets. Since 1970, we get a mean reversion about every 10 years. Let's say mean revert to the past 25 or 30-year PE. That would be a 30, 35% decline. Well, 35% on 250% of GDP is 80, 90% of GDP. 10% of our tax revenues are capital gains, they go to zero. So you can see the budget deficit blowing up. You can see the bond market getting smoked. You can see this kind of negative self-reinforcing effect. In the stock market, we're over-equitized as a country. We have the highest individual equity weightings in the history of the country. And then the real problem is if you look at private equity in 2007-2008, that was about 7% of institutional portfolios. Now it's about 16% of the institutional portfolios. We're so much more illiquid than we were in 2008. The problem is that if you buy the S&P at this current valuation, the 10-year forward return is negative when you buy the S&P with a PE of 22. That's what history shows. So yes, the S&P is spectacular long-term, if you have a hundred-year view. But that's because that's an average of a hundred years, including times when the S&P 500 PE was 6, 7 and 8, or one third of what it is right now. Valuation matters a lot, and the stock market's really high and it's gonna be really hard to make money from here with any kind of long-term view."
Patrick OShaughnessy2,354,494 views • 1 month ago
We found the clip of Andrew Ross Sorkin breaking the Dan Loeb Sony story live on CNBC in 2013, 15 minutes after it happened. It was one of my favorite stories from the conversation with Dan. "The first time we invested in it, it was basically a conglomerate. It had obviously the main Sony studios. It had a semiconductor business, a life insurance business, the consumer electronics. So we advised them to separate these businesses. We met with the management team. We had a big deck that we went through. At the end of the meeting, we told them, "Well, in the interest of transparency, we shared our investment thesis with The New York Times." They went into a panic when we told them about that. Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote the story and agreed to embargo it until the Japanese market closed. The story came out, and they had prearranged us to go on a tour of their innovation center. But before we went on the innovation center, Kaz Hirai (CEO of Sony) looked at me, he says, "You told The New York Times?" I said, "Yeah, but just The New York Times, nobody else." He says, "Okay, just The New York Times." It was wild. We were walking around the innovation center looking at our BlackBerrys when the story went everywhere. They really pushed back on everything that we recommended. It took them about five years, and I think one by one, they've done many of the things."
Patrick OShaughnessy235,282 views • 5 days ago
Get on the plane! I loved Dan's description of what makes a great analyst today relative to 20 years ago. It reminded me of Citrini analyst #3, who flew to the Strait of Hormuz during the war. Being physically present is still one of the most underrated advantages for generating alpha. "The great analyst 20 years ago was someone who could build a model fast and crack a complicated restructuring. When I was at Jefferies, Drexel Burnham went bankrupt with a four-inch disclosure statement that nobody could crack. I spent a whole weekend studying it. That ended up being one of the best claims trades in the history of bankruptcies. Today, I think it's a junior Gavin Baker. Somebody who understands a company or an industry and the nuances of a technology. I had an analyst. Casey's General Stores was one of the best performing stocks. It looked like a tech stock. It was because they weren't a convenience store chain. They were a pizza chain masquerading as convenience stores. So I had an analyst who went to Texas and ate pizza. That kind of analyst today is what is different."
Patrick OShaughnessy258,031 views • 6 days ago
Fascinating to hear the thinking behind Dan's famous activist letters. "Great writing is really about clear thinking and organizing your thoughts, communicating them to people in a clear way to get a desired outcome. In activism, you've got a few different levers. You can have a financial lever. You have legal levers. Social pressure is actually a very effective way. The best way to put social pressure on a company is through writing."
Patrick OShaughnessy207,139 views • 6 days ago
Gavin Baker: "I've been optimistic that the fundamental shortage of wafers, which is really controlled by Taiwan Semi, will prevent a bubble." "If Taiwan Semi did what Jensen wanted, Nvidia could sell $2 trillion of GPUs in 2026 or 2027. But there is a limit where consumers would consume so much that you'd probably be in an overbuild. And you are starting to see companies go to Intel and Samsung. A lot of this may come down to the degree to which Taiwan Semi can maintain a lead over Intel and Samsung and the pace at which they expand capacity. If I were to watch one thing to understand whether there's a bubble, it's Taiwan Semi's capacity decisions. There's a Goldilocks zone where they expand enough to make it hard for Intel or Samsung to emerge as a second source, but they also keep the fundamental constraint on wafers that helps us avoid a bubble."
Patrick OShaughnessy536,094 views • 14 days ago
Darren on why he thinks China will fall in his lifetime: "Dikötter is a well-regarded historian on China and has a theory on how China is not a superpower just by virtue of how illegitimate and weak it is. When you have power and you ascend to power in a fundamentally illegitimate structure, who do you trust? The answer is no one. You're constantly worried that someone's going to put a bullet in the back of your head. That form of illegitimacy cascades down through the immediate organs of that government, including its military. They have turned over their senior military leadership three or four times in the last three years. That is not a high-trust environment. But their magazine depth industrially is so enormous. The calculus becomes, can the magazine depth overcome their institutional weakness? The illegitimacy of the Chinese, fundamentally an illegitimate power, is also our advantage. We are making enormous strides in the clandestine services of co-opting that environment. Xi doesn't know who's on our side in his standing committee. Every day he wakes up with the thought of, maybe I need to kill someone off. That is our edge. We have weaknesses, but we also have enormous strengths. Their weaknesses are also enormous. It doesn't mean they can't bring us to the precipice. Their mass is so much greater than ours. They are fundamentally strong and weak at the same time. But it does fall, because it's fundamentally illegitimate. I believe in the natural order of humanity and freedom — that at some point it's the natural state that ultimately prevails."
Patrick OShaughnessy260,013 views • 8 days ago
"The most important thing in the next 3-4 years is data centers in space. In every way, data centers in space, from a first principles perspective, are superior to data centers on earth. In space, you can keep a satellite in the sun 24 hours a day. The sun is 30% more intense, which results in six times more irradiance than on Earth. So you don't need a battery. The cooling in these data centers is incredibly complicated. Space cooling is free. You just put a radiator on the dark side of the satellite. The only thing faster than a laser going through a fiber optic cable is a laser going through absolute vacuum. Link satellites with lasers, and you have a faster and more coherent network than any data center on Earth."
Patrick OShaughnessy8,209,592 views • 5 months ago
Brian Chesky shares why the saddest day of his life happened the day after Airbnb went public at $100B: "We go public, we have a hundred billion dollar valuation. It's one of the best days of my life. The next day, I go on a Zoom meeting, and it was like it never happened." "It became like the saddest day of my life. Because I realized, I got all this adulation, and I don't feel any different." "Adulation is like a cup with a hole at the bottom. You keep filling it in, thinking it's love, except it just keeps coming out the bottom." "That made me reevaluate what I'm doing this for. I want to do things for pure intrinsic reasons. Do the work like you used to do, like when you were a kid. It was light. Just make stuff. Make it for yourself." "So many entrepreneurs focus on what they want to be. "I want to be a giant tech founder. I want to run a billion-dollar company." Instead of focusing on, "What do I want to make." There's no way to fail if you're making what you love."
Patrick OShaughnessy985,993 views • 29 days ago
Darren on the 20-year plan he argues foreign actors used to co-opt American universities and shift Western opinion on Israel: "The design to co-opt American universities can be traced to a single hotel room in Philadelphia by the FBI. Where, after the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority with Arafat is brought in, and Hamas is considered left out in the cold. They laid out in this single conversation, that the FBI has transcripts of, their plan to co-opt universities and university teaching, for the express purposes of changing Western opinion over the course of 20 years. They had a 20-year plan, and it totally worked. To make it seem like it was this natural formation out of the ether, through moral will, is to dumb down the sophistication of what the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas set out to do. It was done with intent. It was by design."
Patrick OShaughnessy196,308 views • 8 days ago
Gavin on why Elon's new chip fab, Terafab, will be successful: "One, they have a partnership with Intel, which is very important. They're getting access to 50 years of institutional knowledge. The A teams at the semi cap equipment companies will be working with them. ASML, KLA, Lam Research, Applied Materials. One big reason Taiwan Semi caught up is those companies wanted them to catch up. They don't like having a monopsony. And Elon is a living deity in China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. He's going to recruit the best people because the best engineers want to work for him, especially in hardware engineering. Then next to Terafab, there'll be a Taiwan Town. 'These are your favorite restaurants? I'm going to move them and their whole staff from Taiwan to Texas.' Then we'll have Japan Town. Then Korea Town. That's just not the way the people who run Intel and Samsung think. So he's going to have the best talent, the A teams at the wafer fab equipment companies and he has Intel. And it's different enough that it will not alienate Taiwan Semi."
Patrick OShaughnessy289,930 views • 14 days ago
Every conversation I have with Dylan Patel, I'm really just trying to understand the supply and demand of tokens. This is a unique episode in that it's entirely dedicated to talking about both sides of that equation. We discuss: - The infinite demand for the newest models - SemiAnalysis going from $10K on AI spend to $7M - Mythos and Anthropic's compute problem - Why TSMC spending $100B on CapEx could cause a shortage - Robotics as next demand wave - Why memory prices will double again This is my second conversation with Dylan and find myself needing to speak with him more and more often to make sense of it all. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:00 Surging AI Spend 10:27 Token Demand 16:21 When Ideas Are Cheap and Execution is Easy 20:46 Model Hoarding 22:34 Robotics 27:03 The Compute Bottleneck 30:26 The AI Permanent Underclass 31:39 Supply Chain Reality 37:47 CPUs 42:54 Predictions: Public Backlash
Patrick OShaughnessy890,632 views • 1 month ago
In our last conversation, Gavin said data centers in space will be the most important thing in 3-4 years. He explains that means "racks in space" and thinks orbital compute will solve the watts shortage: "When people hear data centers in space, they picture a Pentagon-sized building in space. That's not what it is. A Blackwell rack weighs 3,000 pounds. It's eight feet high. Four feet deep. Three feet wide. It's racks in space. It has these solar wings that are probably 500 feet long on each side. You keep it in a Sun-synchronous orbit, so those solar panels are always in the sun. And then because it's in an exactly Sun-synchronous orbit, the radiator, which extends behind it for hundreds of feet is in the shade. You link these racks using lasers traveling through vacuum which are already on every Starlink. SpaceX operates the world's largest satellite fleet, which is 98 or 99% of all satellites in orbit. Every Starlink, they're cooling it today. I think Starlink V3 is going to operate at 20 kilowatts. A Blackwell rack is only 100 kilowatts. And people talk a lot about density. Well, if you're connecting the racks with lasers through vacuum, you can make the rack bigger physically. In space, there's all sorts of things that SpaceX can do. They also now operate the largest data center on Earth. I've spent a lot of time at Starbase over the years, and I've talked to a lot of SpaceX engineers. It is the most talented group of engineers on planet Earth, and they're very confident they have solved this."
Patrick OShaughnessy266,185 views • 14 days ago
.William Hockey is one of the least visible founders in tech relative to what he has created. He co-founded Plaid and is now building Column, a software company that owns a bank, and powers Ramp, Wise, Bilt, Mercury, and others. He funded it himself by borrowing against nearly everything he had in Plaid shares, and has never raised any outside capital. His story matters because so much of the value in our industry gets created through exactly this kind of extreme personal risk. He is maniacal about being the best in the world at his thing, and has spent his entire career betting on himself and doing whatever it takes to win. He also spends a lot of time outside the US (in places like Kinshasa) which has given him a rare perch on the power of the US dollar. We discuss: - Why emerging markets are often the most financially innovative - What owning 100% of his company allows him to do that VC-backed founders cannot - Getting margin called and nearly going bankrupt - Why the best founders are specialists - What it takes to be the best in the world at your thing - How Silicon Valley's consensus culture produces consensus founders - How the US dollar functions as an instrument of national security Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 9:19 Emerging Markets 14:03 Silicon Valley's Elite Consensus Problem 16:03 Rejecting the VC Hamster Wheel 21:45 Equity and Liquidity 26:03 Funding a Bank 29:45 The Necessity of Extreme Founder Risk 37:18 Finding Leverage 45:20 Longevity and Profitability in Banking 48:46 Matching Your Capital Structure to Your Business 51:44 The Unseen Power of the US Dollar 1:02:30 How AI Will Transform Legacy Banks 1:09:23 The Kindest Thing
Patrick OShaughnessy1,661,998 views • 2 months ago